Photographer Liz Caruana came to know dozens of Bay Area designers through working on projects like look books and editorial spreads, but she realized that few of them had ever met their contemporaries.

"There's a ... community of designers here who are all totally different but share certain values, who follow 'the principles,' " says Caruana, who lives in San Francisco's Richmond District. "And they didn't all even know each other. One day I just stepped back - I had all these contacts and realized no one was documenting the community, capturing that ethos."

In early 2011, she began inviting designers, one by one, to her house and casually - "often over scotch, sometimes over coffee" - taking their pictures. She decided to make the photos into a book.

The resulting collection of 54 portraits will be showcased later this month at the Carte Blanche gallery, accompanied by a self-published book titled "The Bay: Creators of Style." Featured designers range from "Project Runway" alum Christopher Collins to lesser-known names like feather and leather designer Jenn Hall.

"What Liz is doing is very exciting for us and definitely needed," says Chris Ospital, co-owner of Modern Appealing Clothing, an influential boutique in Hayes Valley and Dogpatch that carries many local designers. "No one else is doing anything like it."

"People in San Francisco are extremely individual, and they honor the tribe, which is what this is about," adds her brother and co-owner Ben Ospital. "Where other cities take their cues from (Vogue editor) Anna Wintour, we take ours from Margaret Mead," he says, referring to the cultural anthropologist.

Caruana said she chose to focus on clothing, jewelry, handbag and millinery designers dedicated to sustainable design and local production.

"That's where San Francisco is in terms of fashion," said Caruana, 35. "I found the designers who followed those principles and excelled at them. It was about creating a canon."

She encouraged her subjects to bring in props and wear their designs. Some portraits include thick canvas work belts, tree branches or small dogs, but most are simple moments with the designer. The photos are all in black and white to showcase the designer more than the clothes - "you see the person, just as they are."

"I blend fashion and real life - the grit and the glam. It's a lot harder to photograph the truth of what's happening than to get someone to pose in some high-fashion way."

In her Potrero Hill studio, she uses broad strokes to describe the temperaments of San Francisco designers (resistant to trends, looking more to Paris than to Los Angeles) and shoppers (eclectic and like to mix highs and lows). She keeps an Excel spreadsheet of contacts, nearly 1,500 names long, with meticulous notes (she is, after all, a pacer for the San Francisco marathon club).

Eight years earlier, Canadian-born Caruana was working in Toronto as a camera assistant - "putting clappers in front of Ethan Hawke's face" - when her husband got a job as an engineer at Dolby. They moved to the Inner Richmond and she signed up for photography classes at City College. She started going to fashion and trade shows.

"I was just hoping to do work for them or maybe borrow their clothes for other shoots," she says. "San Francisco has different kinds of fashion - we're not just making T-shirts."

With help from intern schools like California College of the Arts, Caruana shot almost all of the portraits in her house last year. Her husband plays electric guitar, so "a lot of Mastodon and Metallica would be playing."

Colleen Quen, who sells her couture dresses at her boutique South of Market and was photographed by Caruana, remembers when there were more books of Bay Area design.

"There were several books on local designers in the '70s. They were beautiful photo collections, really captured the community," says Quen. "But with mass production and exportation, the sewing companies all broke up, and that community became really scarce. I haven't seen a book since. Liz is certainly the only photographer doing anything like this today.

"Sometimes, we can feel we don't exist. What Liz is doing, it's so honoring. It makes me feel proud to be here, too."